“... art my tormentor without whispering ‘quite!’ When news of this discovery broke, I thought the Oxford Shakespeare’s Associate Editor had flatly blown a gasket. To go public only ten days after finding a poem, and to admit in the same breath that eight years’ work and a million pound investment were at stake in the edition which would include ...”

“... theirstrain of Penicilliumif – as seemed entirely on the cards – theGerman Army were to reach Oxford and sackit: ‘The mould itself must be preserved, undetected. Florey, Heatley, and oneor two others smeared the spores of their strain of Penicilliumnotatum into the linings of their ordinary clothes where it would remain dormant but alive for ...”

“... The alphabet does happy things. The first entry in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs is able to give unforced priority to some of the most important properties of proverbs. ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ First, that it is more recent than you think (c.1850). Second, that nobody has ever heard of the talented person who endowed it with the anonymity of genius (T ...”

“... is ironically indebted to it, for only the market the poetry has created for his name can explain Oxford University Press’s readiness to commission this huge venture while allowing only a single volume of selections to the sermons of Andrewes, who is known only for his clerical accomplishments. Until the 1950s Donne’s sermons could be read only in ...”

“... spaces have changed a great deal. The Picturesque planning – Nash pointed to the High Street in Oxford – remains only in the curve of the Quadrant. The price of coherence was, despite much expensive detailing, not just oppression but dullness. There are no buildings in Regent Street even today in which architecture and selling find a common voice, as ...”

“... which she refers to only as ‘the horrible ambiguity book’. Paton Walsh read English at Oxford in the 1950s, and Goldengrove is in many ways a response to the experience. Madge wants to be a character in To the Lighthouse, or a saintly Jane Eyre reading to a blind Mr Rochester. But instead of becoming part of a tradition of English writing by women ...”

“... Another was the world of the two ‘historic’ English universities – the ‘top’ colleges of Oxford in particular. Trevor-Roper was captured by the second, and married into the first. Enemies invariably called him ‘arrogant’. But it seems that he was never quite confident that he belonged in either world; he took on their manner with an exaggerated ...”

“... In November 1907​ William James, professor of philosophy at Harvard, received an invitation from Oxford. It came from Manchester College – now Harris Manchester and a college of the university, but then an autonomous dissenting institution with a strong Unitarian character, recently relocated from London: its business was to cater to Nonconformist students who were still barred from Oxford ...”

“... life, to judge a book by its cover; and there is much to be learned from the appearance of the new Oxford Middleton. Even as the blurb declares that Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s monumental collection is ‘based on the award-winning design of the Oxford Shakespeare’, the binding and dust jacket defiantly proclaim its ...”

“... postwar politics in France. He has gone on to write more than a hundred pieces for the LRB, as an Oxford scholar whose politics were to the left of the editor’s (Karl Miller favoured the SDP, while Johnson favoured Labour). Nowadays I think he’d still say he was on the left but it isn’t obvious what that would mean, in his case especially. Like many ...”

“... Textual Companion is described by the publisher as ‘an indispensable companion to The Complete Oxford Shakespeare’, which indeed it is, and it was reasonable to complain, when The Complete Works and The Complete Works: Original Spelling Edition appeared in 1986 and 1987, that they were badly in need of this third to walk beside them. The Companion is a ...”

“... of these items as ‘Goldthorpe’ and to the second as ‘Halsey’. Both are productions of the Oxford (Social) Mobility Project, a large collaborative exercise which has operated from a base in Nuffield College since 1969. For a long while, politicians and other interested parties are likely to cite them as authoritative sources, but in order to evaluate ...”

“... can of themselves be held responsible for types of behaviour that underpin male supremacism. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World includes articles on feminism and Muslim counter-feminism which suggest that many of these values are now being challenged. So, too, is the narrow association, in Western minds, of Islam and terrorism, although this ...”

“... 20 and then ‘carefully edited’ nearly 50 years later. It describes a time when she and some Oxford friends had formed a touring concert party, the Magpie Players, and were travelling round the Cotswolds bringing dance, ballads and allegorical Tudor drama to varyingly enthusiastic audiences. Here, not quite a writer yet and not quite at war ...”

“... career started in London, with early work like ‘Dream of the City Shopwoman’, ‘Coming Up Oxford Street: Evening’, and ‘From Her in the Country’. As with many writers before and since the intensity of his literary ambition was at war with more dutiful desires, like pleasing his parents and securing the little bourgeois castle of job, income and ...”